


echo to echo

by singsongsung



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 12:36:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17766905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: Somewhere in Quebec, Betty trades the tattered remains of her wedding dress for an ill-fitting pair of jeans and a McGill University sweatshirt.-Archie/Jughead/Betty, and all iterations thereof.





	echo to echo

**Author's Note:**

> This is a threesome fic. I am writing this in the beginning notes, before you've even read a word, so I hope you understand that if you don't like threesome fics, or if you particularly hate this threesome, reading through this whole fic anyway just to make yourself angry and then pouring all that anger into a comment would be rather rude. If this isn't your cup of tea, please simply refrain from drinking it.

 

 

Somewhere in Quebec, at an abandoned farm with a blue-and-white flag flapping despondently in the yard, Betty trades the tattered remains of her wedding dress for an ill-fitting pair of jeans and a McGill University sweatshirt she found in what appears to have once been a teenage girl’s room.

Archie stands sentry at the door while she battles her way out of the dirty gown, his back turned to her to give her some semblance of privacy. The t-shirt he’s wearing has been slashed open over the back of one shoulder. Betty’s been worrying about the gash there; she’s not sure what they’ll do if it gets infected. Every time her eyes land on it, there’s an acidic kind of lurch beneath her heart. She keeps thinking of a little boy who skinned his knee on her driveway and the tears that welled in his eyes.

“It was pretty,” Archie says, his words filling the silent, still air. “Your dress.”

The dirty ivory fabric pools around Betty’s feet. She once thought it was the softest thing she’d ever felt. “It was.”

“Yeah, pretty dress,” Archie muses, as she eyes his back uneasily. “I didn’t really want you to marry him, though.”

Betty’s body goes rigid, stuck in place, one hand stretched toward a tank top she’d intended to yank on over her head. Fight, flight, or freeze; that’s how it always is these days.

She says, “Arch,” and because they’ve known each other for two full decades, he knows what she means: _turn around._

He does, his grip on the baseball bat he’s holding still tight enough to turn his knuckles white. Betty is naked. Her hair is tangled and matted; she hasn’t shaved her legs in more than two weeks. She smells.

Archie sets the baseball bat very carefully on the floor; soundlessly. He steps over it and toward her. He’s looking at her like she used to wish he would, fifteen years old and blissfully ignorant of all that was to come. She thinks it’s too late - far too late - but when he sets his hands oh-so-carefully on her bare hips, she gasps, like the flame she’d once held for him so tenderly might rise up from the ashes it had become.

He slips his hand between her legs, fingers exploring boldly, before he’s even kissed her.

.  
.  
.  
.

Archie is always very gentle with her - she wonders if this is the kind of sex he thought she and Jughead were having. He is quick to find her clit, thumb tracing the softest circles; he always wants her good and wet for him, ready to be fucked.

She pushes him away more often than not, shoves at his shoulders, gets him on his back, and pulls down his pants. She likes for it to hurt a little when he fills her up, stretches her out. She likes the hiss that comes out from between his teeth.

“You kill me, Betts,” he groans as she licks him clean of their come, and she thinks _oh please, keep me alive._

.  
.  
.  
.

When they find a place to sleep indoors, and the windows are boarded and the door is braced shut, Betty feels just a bit of the tension release in her jaw, and revels in the few brief hours during which her teeth won’t be clenched tight together.

She and Archie share a can of pinto beans for dinner. She remembers his young, impish face, legs swinging beneath his parents’ dining room table. _Beans, beans,_ he’d sing, laughing, an eye tooth missing from his mouth, _they’re good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart!_

Betty’s heart does not feel good. In fact, it feels terrible.

They sleep on a bare mattress in what was once a master bedroom, their packs propped by the door in case they need to make a speedy exit. Archie strokes her hip, her thigh, and Betty peels off her t-shirt. He cups her breast in his hand and squeezes gently, so gently, and she feels like she could scream or cry when she orders him, pleads with him, “ _Touch_ me.”

He rolls one nipple between his fingers and puts his mouth on the other, sucking harshly than softly, grazing pebbled skin with his teeth, tracing around the hardened peak with his tongue in circles so slow they’re torturous. Betty mewls and clutches at him and her hips buck up off the mattress, but when he slips his fingertips into her underwear she whispers, “ _No,_ ” and pulls his hair, hard.

She comes with Archie's tongue flicking insistently at her nipple and her hips rolling against a memory, the phantom feeling of the man she loves (loved?) thrusting into her, whispering to her, and she cries, “Jug - Juggie, I - ” and whimpers through her orgasm.

While she’s breathing hard, eyes closed, she feels the mattress begin to move, springs squeaking quietly. Blinking slowly, she sees that Archie’s still right next to her, jerking himself off, his brows knit together in concentration. She watches him, and their eyes lock together, green and brown, as his breathing grows more erratic.

She kisses him when he comes, and swallows down his groans.

.  
.  
.  
.

“Tell me again,” Betty says, breathing hard as they trudge through the forest on the other side of the Ontario border. “Tell me.”

Archie walks three paces to her right, two paces ahead. His hair is growing out and falling into his eyes. “We split up to look for you,” he says, voice low in his throat. “We couldn’t remember which room you were getting ready in. He went left. I went right.”

“Why?” she says, a question neither of them will ever be able to answer. There was no rationale in that decision, just two men, each of whom wanted to find her. “Why?”

“Betty,” he sighs, wincing as he tugs at the straps of his pack, “I don’t know.”

Her foot squelches down into some mud. Once, that might’ve been the worst part of her day; today, it doesn’t come close. There’s brain matter smeared all across her shirt from the pair of Infecteds they’d encountered a couple hours ago. Her adrenaline and anxiety are still working their way out of her veins.

“Archie,” she whispers, her throat going tight. “Was he happy?”

He steps closer and reaches for her, slinging his arm across her shoulders like they’re ten years old again and walking down to the river. He presses his nose into her knotty hair, against her greasy scalp, like she’s still someone beautiful. “’Course he was.”

.  
.  
.  
.

She says Jughead’s name all the time during sex. It’s a habit she can’t quite manage to break.

Archie buries his face between her breasts as she rides him and she pants, “Jug, Jug - ” as her release builds, and she imagines it’s his hair between her fingers and his mouth on her skin and his hands spread over her ass.

“Fuck,” Archie breathes, chasing down his own orgasm. “ _Fuck._ ”

He never seems to care whose name falls out of her mouth.

He calls her _Betts_ , just like his best friend used to.

.  
.  
.  
.

On the train tracks near Lake Ontario, there is a sign. _UNINFECTED CAMP_ , it says, paint fading on wood. Betty presses her hand to that sign like it will give her an answer, and comes away with a splinter that Archie extracts, painstakingly, from her palm. She remembers another boy looking at blood in her palms, and laying his lips upon her knuckles.

The sign points toward Toledo. They walk on.

.  
.  
.  
.

The world, Betty learns, has clung to a shred of its mercy yet.

Outside of Providence, Ohio, the soles of Betty’s feet aching so badly that each footstep feels stalled, they come across the camp.

Inside the camp, they find Jughead.

Betty’s heart seizes when she sees him, and she cries out, an indistinct sound. He drops the axe he’s carrying and begins racing toward her, and somehow her tired feet find the strength to move in his direction.

About four steps in, she realizes that something feels strange, and it is this: Archie is no longer beside her. She turns and says, “Arch,” and he jerks his chin as if to say _you go on ahead_ , but Betty shakes her head and yanks at his sleeve, pulling him along.

The three of them collide all at once, Jughead’s arm encircling them both.

“Oh, fuck, I thought you were dead,” he breathes. “I thought you were dead.” Betty sobs and he presses his forehead so tightly to hers that it hurts. In her peripheral vision she catches sight of Jughead’s dirty fingers in Archie’s dirty hair, holding his head, keeping him close to them, Archie’s forehead jammed against Jughead’s jawbone.

“Juggie,” she sobs, and he kisses her chapped lips.

She can feel the heat of Archie’s wet, tearful breaths against their mouths.

.  
.  
.  
.

Jughead’s mother is running the camp - she calls it a compound. She walks with purpose and authority in a pair of combat boots, and seems to have things running with precision.

“Get this poor girl cleaned up, Jughead,” she says, giving Betty’s arm a gentle squeeze, when Jughead brings his friend and fiancée, back from the dead, to see her.

Betty glances back and forth between the two of them and asks, very quietly, “JB? Your dad?”

Jughead’s eyes squeeze shut briefly as he shakes his head. “They got trapped in a mob in Greendale.”

“I’m so sorry,” Betty whispers, and the man she was supposed to marry on the day the world as they knew it ended gives his head another shake.

“I have you back,” he says, and for a split second, his lips tremble against each other.

Betty nods, making her own attempt at a smile, and allows her eyes to drift back toward Gladys and Archie. She knows Gladys vaguely, her own mother’s years-long dislike of Jughead’s mom meaning they didn’t spend much time together during her childhood. Archie’s parents had no such biases, and he knows Gladys better, has a history with her; he weeps into the hug she gives him.

Beneath her too-big cargo pants, Betty’s knees shake and knock together.

.  
.  
.  
.

With a cloth and a basin of water, Jughead slowly removes caked mud, Infected guts, dried blood, and dirt from Betty’s skin. He handles her with care, his eyes deep in their sadness when his fingers linger over her protruding ribs.

“Remember,” Betty says, a hysterical laugh rising up through her throat, “remember how much I wanted to lose ten pounds before the wedding. Remember how much I thought my mom expected it. Remember how much I wanted everyone else to be happy.”

“Yeah, baby,” he replies, moving the damp cloth around her lips. “I remember.”

He tells her what happened. How the hallway down which he turned left, while Archie went right, led him to their families. How his mother had a plan; how her mother did, too; how their plans contradicted. How he’d retraced his footsteps down that hallway frantically, running for her, and come face to face with an infected member of the hotel’s housekeeping staff. How he’d almost been bitten, how his sister had screamed, how his mother had saved him. How he never saw her family again, after that hallway.

Betty thinks of her mother, always determined to make things happen just the way she wants. For a split second, she has faith.

And then she thinks of her sister’s twins, her niece and nephew, all of eight years old. She thinks of how fast those kids could possibly run. Her faith dissolves into dust in her chest.

She breaks down, and Jughead cradles her in his arms, her bare skin against his flannel shirt, his hand stroking her damp hair. When she kisses him, snot-nosed and desperate to feel something other than grief, he pulls back slowly and runs his thumbs across her cheeks.

“You’re safe now,” he promises her. “Sweetheart, you’re safe now.”

.  
.  
.  
.

Betty eats half a sandwich for dinner, one of her shoulders pressed to Jughead’s and one to Archie’s, a sandwich of their own. After five bites her exhaustion catches up to her and her head lolls on Archie’s shoulder; someone shifts her very gently to lean against Jughead instead, and she can’t be bothered to open her eyes to find out who. She flits in and out of sleep as someone carries her, across the compound and into one of the homes its inhabitants occupy, and lays her down on a mattress. The person smoothes her hair off her face and says, “Sleep well, Betts,” and she’s so deeply bone-tired that she can’t even recognize their voice.

.  
.  
.  
.

On her third day at the camp, she wakes before Jughead, and watches the sun’s first rays move over his face. When he opens his eyes, she whispers, “I love you.”

“Love you, too, baby,” he says, words made gravelly by sleep. He slips his hand beneath the long t-shirt she’s been wearing at night and strokes her hip and then her thigh, his thumb ghosting back and forth over the waistband of her panties. She catches his hand with her own and slips it between her thighs.

Jughead moans, so softly she could almost have imagined it. “I thought I’d never get to touch you again, Betts.”

“I’m here,” she tells him, thumbing at his bottom lip. “I’m here and I was about twenty minutes from marrying you, so maybe you could love me like I’m your wife.”

He slides a hand beneath her and flips her onto her back. Her legs open for him and he grinds his cock, straining against the fabric of a pair of basketball shorts that he never would have worn in the world as they once knew it, right against her center, and Betty’s wet for him in a heartbeat, her hips pushing back against his.

“You are my wife,” he says, his elbows bracketed on either side of her head. His words are meant for her alone and the moment is theirs alone, faces so close, the rest of the world somewhere far away. “You are my wife, and I’m your husband. I love you, Betts. I adore you. I have since I was sixteen; I will forever. For better, for worse. Til d - til death do us part.”

“Til death do us part,” she vows to him in turn, and he presses a kiss to her lips before he begins skimming his mouth down her body: neck, breasts, abdomen, hipbones -

“Juggie,” Betty whispers, even as he peels off her panties and hooks one of her calves up over his shoulder. She doesn’t think the old rules of morality apply to this new world, but she’s still herself, so she _has_ to say it. She props herself up on her elbows. “Jug, after - on the way here - Archie and I - ”

He licks a long, slow stripe up her with such purpose that she thinks he may have activated nerve endings that were never touched before; it has her gasping sharply and falling back to the mattress, a tremor running through her thighs.

“I know,” he murmurs, right into her cunt, lapping at her like he’s a man in a desert and she’s an oasis. He teases her clit with his tongue. “You tasted like him. When you got here.”

Betty has neither the words nor the wherewithal to ask how, beneath layers of dirt and crime and blood and sweat and tears, that _Archie_ was a taste Jughead could identify. He builds her up to an orgasm so intense that she has to bite down on a mouthful of her own discarded underwear to keep from crying out at a volume she’s convinced any nearby Infected would hear.

.  
.  
.  
.

For the entire first week, Betty wakes repeatedly throughout the night, unaccustomed to trusting sleep anymore. Jughead typically stirs at least a little, laying a hand against her back, nuzzling his face against her neck, pulling her closer. Slowly, her heart slows its racing pace, and she settles in for another hour or two of slumber.

One night, however, deep in the darkest hours, she finds herself wide awake, her heart pounding and pounding and pounding. She eases herself out of bed slowly and tiptoes out of the room, down the stairs, and out into the night.

To her surprise, the first thing she sees is Archie, sitting under a nearby tree, his trusty baseball bat propped against its trunk. Even as her eyes are adjusting to the dark, she can see the glint of another set of eyes; he’s not asleep.

Betty tries to make her footsteps as obvious as possible, not wanting to startle him. “Arch?” she asks. “What’re you doing out here?”

“Betts,” he says, and echoes her, “What are you doing up?”

She crosses her arms over her chest, rubbing lightly at the gooseflesh that’s rising on her skin. She nudges his foot with her own. “Asked you first.”

“I just, uh…” He rubs at his hair, an old nervous habit that she knows well. “I can’t really sleep.”

“It’s hard for me too,” she confesses, kneeling beside him. “But we’re safe here, Arch. We really are.”

“Yeah, I - I know. I just can’t sleep in that bed. It’s weird, after the ground for so long.” He scrunches up his face, like he doesn’t want to say the next words that leave his mouth: “Can’t really sleep without you.”

She feels her eyes widen in her face, and she drops both her hands onto one of his. “Arch.” They still spend virtually every waking moment together, but she’s still angry at herself for not realizing how he must feel during the nights. All those weeks together, just the two of them against the world, pressed close together on dry ground, between blades of grass, watching for danger in shifts. She doesn’t think she could sleep alone either.

His face wrinkles again, and she realizes he’s cringing. “I’ll get used to it. I - I’m so happy we found Jug. I’m happy for _you_ and Jug. I’m not trying to do anything here, Betty, I swear.”

“I know,” she whispers. “I know that’s not what this is.”

And it’s not. It’s not some choice she has to make between Archie and Jughead. Jughead is her fiancé - her husband, after their unofficial morning vows. Archie is the man she spent weeks alone with during what they eventually realized was the fucking zombie apocalypse, the man she fought with and fucked with to stay alive. They are two boys, two men, whom she’s loved from their backyard treehouse days. It’s not a competition, but -

When Archie asks her, “So what is it?”

She says, “It’s something,” and pulls him to his feet.

.  
.  
.  
.

Betty crawls back into bed, using one hand to nudge Jughead over and the other to pull Archie in after her. “Arch is gonna sleep with us,” she whispers to Jughead as he shuffles around, his eyes slitting open.

“Mm, ’kay,” he mutters on a sleepy sigh, and Archie sighs too, with relief, pulling the sheet up over his chest.

That night, she sleeps straight through to sunrise.

.  
.  
.  
.

She helps a thin man named Marvin fix a truck, her head ducked beneath its hood, her tongue poked between her teeth as reaches for a wrench.

“He’s been different since you got here,” Marvin grunts, and Betty pauses in her task, lifts her head, and sees that he’s watching Jughead and Archie walk by. “Didn’t think he knew how to smile, to be honest.”

Betty looks on as they shove at each other’s shoulders, laughing, lines etched around their mouths and eyes that weren’t there before. They look like they’re back in the parking lot at Pop’s, like they’re walking down Elm Street in the summer’s fading light. They’re both holding guns, but their faces are so open, unencumbered.

Right now, she’s not the one responsible for painting a smile across Jughead’s face.

.  
.  
.  
.

Archie’s presence becomes a permanent one in the bed that Jughead used to sleep in alone. Betty sleeps tucked between his body and Jughead’s, often with her head against Jughead’s chest and her feet tangled between Archie’s. One of them - usually Archie - always disappears before she wakes, so it’s never something they talk about.

There is a morning, though, after a particularly stressful night following an encounter with a group of Infected who nearly breached the compound’s southern wall, when they all sleep late. Archie’s exhausted from an evening of lobbing his baseball bat at undead heads, Betty’s exhausted from a midnight shift at the watchpost, and Jughead’s exhausted from his late-night efforts to help fortify the south wall. None of them open their eyes until after the sun has made its ascent into the sky.

Betty doesn’t know who wakes up first. They’re all shifting around, sighing and stretching and yawning, the mattress creaking under their weight. Archie’s eyes remain closed, his face half-smushed into a pillow. Jughead’s eyes are open, and he tucks his face into Betty’s neck, laying kisses against her skin.

“Hi,” she whispers to him.

“Hi,” he whispers back, and she catches his mouth with her own, kissing him slowly and soundly, revelling in the fact that the sun is shining and they are still alive.

Jughead tugs her body atop his, and she’s prepared to stretch out, to kiss him languidly for as long as she can, but the feeling of him hard against her belly pushes her sleepiness to the side, replaces it with something simmering.

“Let me fuck you, baby, yeah?” he murmurs, peeling her shirt up and over her head.

“Yeah,” Betty breathes, discarding the shirt, and then reminds him, as if either of them could have possibly forgotten, “Archie’s here.”

“Yeah,” is all Jughead says in reply, and thirty seconds later Betty’s underwear is gone and his fingers are gliding gently along her folds, making sure she’s ready.

He moans her name when she sinks down onto him, and they set a slow rhythm together, unrushed, Betty’s head tipped back in pleasure as Jughead’s hand cups one of her breasts.

“Oh, fuck,” Jughead sighs. “Archie.”

Betty’s eyes snap open and she looks into his face, only to find that his eyes aren’t on her, that his head is turned to the other side of the bed.

“Arch, look at her,” Jughead says roughly. “I know you’re awake.”

Slowly, Archie opens his eyes. He looks straight at Jughead for a long moment, and then, at a pace that feels downright glacial to her, he turns his gaze to Betty.

She says, “ _Oh_ ,” in a voice that’s tight and needy, the word trembling out of her mouth, stretched to about five syllables.

“Christ,” Archie breathes, and he seems to reach out in spite of himself, laying a tentative hand on her hip.

“Isn’t she so beautiful,” Jughead murmurs. “Baby, you’re so beautiful.” He grabs her hips, one hand on top of Archie’s, shifting their angle a little, fucking her even deeper. “Do you want to come?”

“Yes,” she gasps.

“You always come for me,” he says, breathing heavily, eyes dark and hooded as he looks up at her. “Will you come for Archie, too?”

Betty can only moan, her eyes falling shut. She braces one hand behind herself, against his thigh, meeting him thrust for thrust, getting so, so close. She wrenches her eyes open and says, “Kiss.”

Jughead slides a hand around to the small of her back and sits up beneath her, but she presses a hand, hard, to his chest. Between the sounds she can’t help but keep making, half-gasps, half-moans, she clarifies her point, “Kiss _him_.”

He falls back against the pillow, his eyes less hazy now. He blinks at her, and then turns to Archie, and then, and then -

And then their mouths meet, and Betty comes so hard. It crashes over her like a tidal wave and steals the breath from her lungs.

She curls against Jughead’s chest afterwards, boneless. Archie’s cheeks are scarlet. She strokes her thumb over his warm, flushed skin at the same lazy pace that Jughead’s fingertips are trailing up and down her spine.

.  
.  
.  
.

In October - on, coincidentally enough, what Betty believes to be Halloween, though no one is quite sure of dates anymore - the southern wall collapses under the weight of a horde of Infected.

Betty is on watch when it happens, holding the gun Gladys had given her but that she’s not yet had occasion to use. She’s paired up with Marvin again; he’s quiet but he seems to like her.

He runs forward when the wall gives way. The presence of the Infected, and Marvin’s bravery, leave Betty frozen in place. She mouths his name, but no sound leaves her lips.

She hears his dying screams, as they rip into his intestines and eat him from the inside out.

They are coming for her, the Infected, lurching toward her on undead legs. She hears yelling behind her but she cannot turn; it’s her job to protect the camp. She’s the only one who can protect herself.

From somewhere distant on her right, she hears a raw bellow of her name, “ _Betts._ ” It’s Jughead, and she can only imagine that he’s running as fast as his feet can carry him. Out of the corner of her left eye, she sees a distinct, unmistakable head of red hair, barrelling in her direction.

It’s like a hotel hallway on her wedding day all over again, both of them searching her out, dashing to save her. The thought of losing either of them is suddenly more painful than losing her own self.

She lifts her gun and shoots.

She shoots the two Infected right in front of her. She shoots the one behind Jughead that is moving in too close for comfort. She delivers the killing shot to the one Archie didn’t quite manage to put down. And by the time her magazine is empty, they are there on either side of her, covering her as she reloads her gun.

.  
.  
.  
.

When it’s finally over, Betty steps away from the men who’ve been flanking her (for minutes? for hours?) and walks slowly toward Marvin’s torn-up corpse. She drops to her knees beside him and whispers, “Thank you.” She thinks he might have saved her life. She hates herself for not saving his.

Jughead drops down into the dirt next to her. “You’re okay, yeah?” he checks quietly, touching her cheek, her shoulder, her thigh. “None of them touched you?”

“None of them touched me,” she murmurs.

“Are you sure?” asks Archie, and she realizes that the hand on her shoulder actually belongs to him, and that he’s kneeling on the other side of her, his eyes wide with panic and his face stained with blood.

She nods, and says, “You’re okay, too?” She turns to Jughead. “You’re okay?” Her eyes well up, her vision going blurry.

“We’re okay,” Archie swears. He kisses her damp cheek. “Betts, we’re all okay.”

A wet sob falls out of her mouth, and she gestures uselessly toward Marvin.

“I know,” Jughead murmurs, rubbing at her back. She feels both sets of their arms close around her, holding her tightly, keeping her safe. Their chins perch on her head and she weeps between their chests until she has no tears left to cry.

When she peeks up at them from under her wet eyelashes, she swears she catches sight of their mouths pressed hard together.

.  
.  
.  
.

It’s several nights before they all sleep together again. The unfortified wall necessitates long nighttime shifts at watch. Gladys refuses to give any of them special treatment, and over and over again, Betty gives Jughead a goodnight kiss at three-thirty in the morning, as she leaves her shift and he starts his. Archie is off at another post, and she lays awake all by herself in the middle of the bed, her body jolting at every unexpected sound she hears.

When she finally has them back on either side of her body, she thinks she should want to sleep, to catch up on slumber after all those lonely nights, but she finds that her skin is buzzing, that her eyes are wide and her heart is wanting.

Archie spoons against her back, aligning his hips with hers. Betty breathes against Jughead’s sternum and watches as he strokes his hand up and down the arm that Archie’s got around her waist. She matches the movements of Jughead’s hand when she starts grinding her ass against Archie.

He moans into her hair, bites down on her shoulder. She reaches up and pushes her fingers into his hair, and then slowly shifts onto her back. She slides her hand down over his neck and his chest and his stomach until she finally reaches his cock, around which she wraps her hand securely.

“Betty,” he murmurs.

“Hi,” she replies, smiling softly, sweetly. She strokes him a couple times as Jughead slips a hand between her legs and cups her over her panties, his middle finger teasing her a little. She rubs her other hand over him and finds him half-hard.

“When did you kiss?” she asks them both, giving Archie her attention again. “Before. I know you did.”

He leans in and tugs at her nipple with his teeth, which makes the hand that’s stroking him falter. Jughead takes advantage of the moment to slip his hand into her panties, right against her, and she squeezes her thighs together, and resumes jerking Archie off.

“Tell me,” she whispers to them.

“Before you,” Archie says. “Before you and Jug.” He tugs at the neckline of her shirt roughly until one of her breasts is bared to him.

“We were fourteen, maybe,” Jughead murmurs, sucking lightly at her earlobe. “Before you, Betts. Never while we were - ”

“Did you do more?” she interrupts him. “Than kiss?”

“Lil’ more,” Archie murmurs distractedly. “Betts, can you - ” He guides her other hand to his balls.

“Mmhm,” she says. “And Jughead can help.” She puts a kiss against Jughead’s jaw and meets his eyes. “Touch him with me, Juggie.”

He doesn’t need to be asked twice, removing his hand from her panties and wrapping fingers that are sticky with her arousal around Archie’s length, pumping his hand in tandem with hers.

Archie looks overwhelmed by this turn of events, his eyes locking onto Betty’s for a long moment. She puts her face close to his, tells him, “You can kiss me, Arch.”

He breaks eye contact with her, his eyes flying across her body, seeking out Jughead’s gaze instead. Betty frowns; she can speak for herself.

“ _Archie_ ,” she says more firmly, “Kiss me.”

He does, and she shifts onto her side so that she’s facing him fully, her hand working him alongside Jughead’s and her lips parting to grant his tongue entrance into her mouth.

Into her ear, with a thread of amusement running through his voice, Jughead murmurs, “That’s my girl,” and then sucks a mark onto her neck.

.  
.  
.  
.

Two weeks later, Gladys chooses Jughead and Archie to go on a supply run. Betty bites her bottom lip when she hears this announcement and gets up from her seat. “I’ll go, too,” she says.

Gladys gives her head a single, brusque shake. “I want you here, on the perimeter. Turns out you have some pretty natural talent with that glock I gave you.”

Archie rockets to his feet as well. “You can’t just put her out there by herself as front line defense - ”

“She should go on the run,” Jughead cuts in. “With me, with Archie, whatever. She shouldn’t - ”

Gladys lifts a hand into the air and they both go silent, frowns tugging at the corners of their mouths. “I don’t have any need for this grand display of testosterone,” she says drily. “And I don’t believe Betty does either?” She arches a questioning brow.

Betty nods, slowly. She’ll do her part. She’ll do Marvin proud. “I can handle the perimeter,” she says, and Jughead and Archie look unhappily at her, and then at each other, but they’ve known her for enough years; it doesn’t even seem to cross their minds that they might argue.

.  
.  
.  
.

She watches them walk off in the morning, when the sky is pink and gold. There is a gun holstered at her hip and steel in her spine. Gladys stands to her left, smoking a cigarette.

“To be honest,” Jughead's mother says, breaking the silence. “I always thought those two were gonna end up together.” She eyes Betty. “I forgot to account for you, I suppose.” Something like a smile curves along her mouth. “That was stupid of me, I can admit.”

Betty gives her a small, fleeting smile in return, and then fixes her eyes back on the human shapes that are growing smaller and smaller as they move toward the forest. She remembers the sight of those same backs facing her in an Elm Street backyard, watching them rush off from her perch at the treehouse door, assured in the knowledge that they’d be back momentarily with a snack or a cape or a pack of playing cards.

Her boys.

They’ll come home to her, she knows. They always do.

.  
.  
.  
.

fin. 


End file.
